Oct

. 28, DPKO Headquarters">
Oct. 28, DPKO Headquarters, Freetown, Sierra Leone
The day before Mayordomo is to go to Koidu, hes at the Mammy Yoko Hotel.
The place was a luxury hotel back when Sierra Leone was a British colony and
a seaside resort. But the pool has been drained of water, and weeds are growing
up through cracks in the tennis courts. Vehicles coming in the gates are checked
for bombs, and white U.N. vehicles, mostly Toyota 4Runners, are parked helter-skelter
around a dirt lot.

When the headquarters staff took over the building, the U.N. restored several
floors that had suffered bomb damage, but the interior still looks ragged.
Mayordomo points out the exposed network wires hanging from the ceiling, then
opens up a plumbing and ventilation closet to show how theyre strung between
floors. On the way out, he shows a conduit containing strands of fiber-optic
cables snaking up the pillars on the hotels back porch, paralleling some
older wiring. "Its really quite messy," he admits.

Peacekeeping missions pose unique challenges. Typically, the peacekeepers
come in after years of war and destruction of the local infrastructure. Telecommunications
and power systems are unreliable, if theyre operating at all, so the U.N.
must be capable of providing its own power, phone and Internet services.
Downhill from the hotel is a cluster of prefab buildings, constructed from
shipping containers stacked two high, with open drainage ditches running between
them. Mayordomo has his office in one of these containers. In the adjacent
lot, several satellite dishes study the sky from within a fenced area bracketed
by another cluster of these containerized offices. One dish mounted on a trailer
sits next to a Ford van meant to function as a miniature, movable computer-and-communications
center.
Known as the Mobile Data Telecommunications System, the van was custom-built
by Frontline Communications, a company that mostly specializes in television-news
vans. It carries about $100,000 worth of servers and satellite-communications
equipment. A fold-down panel on the outside provides access to power, phone
and Ethernet sockets instead of video jacks. On a full tank of gas, the built-in
generator provide 24 hours of power.

This van will help UNAMSIL in the event the mission has to evacuate, taking
with it a subset of essential information systems. Over the summer, when the
U.N. was gearing up for its peacekeeping effort in Liberia, two similar vans
were prepared in this courtyard. Once packed with servers and radio-communications
equipment, they were flown to Liberia on Aug. 23 and driven with their satellite-dish
trailers in tow to Monrovia, the Liberian capital.
This initiative was part of the reason Mayordomo came to Sierra Leone. In
addition to promising to straighten out UNAMSILs technology problems, he
told his boss he would prepare a "virtual mission" containing all the technology
that would be needed at the beginning of a new mission in Liberia. Even earlier,
on Aug. 4, communications specialists from Sierra Leone had gone to Liberia
to prepare.
On the wall in Mayordomos office is a satellite image of the abandoned U.N.
facility, a relic of a previous peacekeeping mission, that they targeted as
an initial base of operations. Details of the compound are outlined in red,
including the satellite dish inside the walls.
Communications manager John McKenzie joins Mayordomo in front of the map
to tell that part of the story. "There are a lot of Liberians in Freetown,
and we were able to make contact with a woman who lived right here," he says,
pointing to the rooftop of a house just down the street. "We had her walk
by every day to see if the dish was still intact. Then we went in light, just
a couple of guys. We were luckyall they had to do was pour gas in the
generator and find the satellite."
Strictly speaking, there was no mission to support in August. A regional
peacekeeping force, organized by the Economic Community of West African States,
was active in Liberia, but the U.N. Security Council didnt provide the mandate
or funding for DPKO to intervene until September.
Mayordomos approach to rapid deployment was to have everything ready before
the official word came. He had Internet access, Lotus Notes and other basic
systems operational in Liberia two weeks before the assessment team arrived.
There was even a finance system so the bureaucrats who would be following
close behind the soldiers could account for where the missions money went.
All this helped the assessment team complete its work quickly and get the
go-ahead for an Oct. 1 mission startup.
"Im very proud of what we did there," says Erzen Ilijazi, a network-management
supervisor who was part of the team that prepared the technology, then flew
into Liberia to set it up. UNAMSIL technical staff spent three days setting
up 11 servers and configuring about $100,000 worth of equipment on the server
racks in the back of each van.
After flying to Liberia, the UNAMSIL technicians took the van by convoy to
their destination in Monrovia. "I think we got there about 4 p.m., and we
had everything ready by 9 p.m.thats anti-virus, network, Internet,
satellite dish so they can be online, VHF, UHF, mobile communications, all
in five or six hours," Ilijazi says.
Despite the professional rewards, Ilijazi didnt enjoy his time in Monrovia.
"I saw a lot of people in civilian clothes, guys on the street, walking around
with automatic weapons," he says. "I dont like to see that." He had enough
of that in Kosovo, where he lived before using a job with the U.N. as his
ticket out of the Balkans.
Next Page: Oct. 31, Freetown, Sierra Leone.

David F. Carr is the Technology Editor for Baseline Magazine, a Ziff Davis publication focused on information technology and its management, with an emphasis on measurable, bottom-line results. He wrote two of Baseline's cover stories focused on the role of technology in disaster recovery, one focused on the response to the tsunami in Indonesia and another on the City of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.David has been the author or co-author of many Baseline Case Dissections on corporate technology successes and failures (such as the role of Kmart's inept supply chain implementation in its decline versus Wal-Mart or the successful use of technology to create new market opportunities for office furniture maker Herman Miller). He has also written about the FAA's halting attempts to modernize air traffic control, and in 2003 he traveled to Sierra Leone and Liberia to report on the role of technology in United Nations peacekeeping.David joined Baseline prior to the launch of the magazine in 2001 and helped define popular elements of the magazine such as Gotcha!, which offers cautionary tales about technology pitfalls and how to avoid them.